Depression is a trip – LSD

katherine riegel

I don’t know much about drug trips from personal experience (unfortunately? I don’t know—I overheard some writers behind me at a reading recently talking about traveling the country on LSD when they were younger, and these were women in their 40s and 50s who were clearly oh so much more badass than they looked, and I confess I felt a bit envious, if also a bit ashamed at my own timidity), but it seems to me depression is like a drug trip for a lot of reasons. You don’t seem to have any control over how you perceive the world, or how you respond to it. You feel like you’re not your usual self, and you fear you may never get back to being your usual self, or that your “usual self” is in fact your “unusual self,” and the majority of who you are is actually A Depressed Person. Other people can tell you that your perceptions of reality are not accurate, but even when you accept that truth you still can’t make yourself perceive reality differently and react to it appropriately.